No doubt you’ve realised that I haven’t been performing much of late. There are many small reasons for this, though the urge to perform remains as strong as ever, as does the enjoyment I get from it. At the beginning of last year, my day job role changed considerably, which means lots of daily travel and a level of uncertainty as to where I shall be on any particular day. In such a way, without booking days off, (of which I get a modest amount a year), I could not commit to being able to turn up at gigs, and the time that I would normally spend rehearsing, (early mornings before work), was now taken up with early morning trains and waits at station platforms.
On top of this, I now had to spend time away from home in hotels in small towns throughout the south of England, some of which I’d never heard of before. (Midsomer Norton?! They just made that one up, surely!). What this meant was that yes, I had less time to rehearse and faff about with props and learn lines, but it did mean that I had much, much more time to write.
You may know that before I was a performer, I was a writer, and that was all I ever wanted to be. When my school friends dreamed of playing football (or cricket, as I was brought up in Surrey), I only ever wanted to be a published writer and win the Booker Prize instead of the FU Cup.
About three years ago, I started work on a novel which resurrected a character I’d created when I was 12 years old. The character is called Bill. Bill started as a skier who solved crimes in his spare time, (yeah, I know). The first Bill story was written around 1985. By 1990, Bill was now a detective, (his skiing career was over), and I wrote the Bill stories all through my teenage years. I then promptly forgot all about him for thirty years. This new story, Bin, was about Bill’s efforts to get a recycling bin for his new flat, and that’s all that happened in the novel. It was more a test, so that I could get back into writing Bill stories, and seriously, it was like we’d never been apart.
Two years ago, using the tricks I’d learned with Bin, I started a new novel, which I hoped would be a hymn to seaside towns. Red Sand was the result, a novel in which Bill had come down to the seaside to spend time with his old friend Ed, (who was also in those teenage stories), only to find that Ed had gone missing. I’m incredibly happy with Red Sand, particularly its unusual premise in which the whole novel is narrated by Paignton Pier, who is a character in the narrative in their own right.
Last year, I applied to the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course with Red Sand, and wouldn’t you know it, I was chosen. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful class of fellow students online and an amazing tutor in Suzannah Dunn, the author, who was very encouraging and who absolutely loved the novel, and in particular, Bill as a character. Her enthusiasm and kind words certainly made me think that I had the beginnings of something I could work with. She even contacted me when the course finished requesting a copy of a certain chapter which, she said, had stayed in her head long after the course had finished, which I took to be a very good sign.
Red Sand is now finished, (or at least, this draft of it). But I knew I could do better, and write something, well, easier to sell. Over the last few months an idea for a novel came to me, employing the tricks I’ve learned from Bin and Red Sand, and especially from the Curtis Brown course and my fellow students. I am currently working on a new novel called The Hibiscus Throne, again with Bill as the main character. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but it is ostensibly a romantasy fiction which plays around with the genre, with lots more going on under the bonnet. I’m currently deep in the writing of the first draft, churning out sometimes 2000 words a day and, as any writer of a novel will tell you, the characters live in my head constantly, vying for attention and commenting on the world around me.
My day currently looks like this: I get up at five, and write from six until eight. At eight, I go to the station and I catch a train, and I get a table seat on which I then pump in another half hour of writing. I work until five, catch a train home, have dinner, and then do another writing session from seven until nine. I’ve been doing this for the last two months, mostly ensconced in the narrative and writing, writing, writing. Every weekend I go and visit my mother in Brixham, and I spend the whole day writing again, in a room at the back of her garage which I previously used for rehearsing poems.
I cannot wait until The Hibiscus Throne is finished. I have never been interested in romance or fantasy, and while the premise of the story means that it is not really either, I do enjoy the ‘world building’ aspect of it. And I can’t wait for people to see it. It’s quite a departure from my two existing published novels, Reception and The Neon Yak, both of which are still out there.
So, will I get back to performing? Yes, I miss it dreadfully. I miss the people and I miss my poem friends, and I miss having an audience and immediate feedback. Writing often feels a solitary pursuit, somewhat insincere, but I kind of love the madness of that insincerity. Over the last few months I have exchanged letters with a very well-respected and famous writer in which he has imparted some amazing advice not only about what it is that we do as artists, but on life in general, too, the solitary nature of writing, and the worlds that we create.
Robert Garnham 